Tuesday, 31 May 2016

In a New York magazine cover profile published this week, Clinton said she encounters people on rope lines who tell her, “I really admire you, I really like you, I just don’t know if I can vote for a woman to be president.”

Riiiiight. People travel to her events, stand in lines, and go through metal detectors just to tell her this. Uh-huh.

The percentage of people rejecting her candidacy only because of her sex is somewhere between the percentage of New Jersey Muslims who publicly celebrated 9/11 and the percentage of Mexicans who are rapists.

Katie Couric has responded to the furor over a maliciously edited anti-gun movie by posting an apology and the transcript of the deleted response to a question. No retraction, no re-editing. And note this in the transcript:

MALE: The fact is we do have statutes, both at the federal and state level that prohibit classes of people from being in possession of firearms. If you’re under 18 in Virginia you can’t walk around with a gun. If you’re an illegal immigrant, if you’re a convicted felon, if you’ve been adjudicated in same, these things are already illegal. So, what we’re really asking about is a question of prior restraint. How can we prevent future crime by identifying bad guys before they do anything bad? And, the simple answer is you can’t.

Let me go out on a limb. The man said “adjudicated insane,” not “adjudicated in same.” Sheesh.

Monday, 30 May 2016

A few miles outside my hometown of Cambridge, England, there is a well-manicured field on the far outskirts of a handsome little village named Madingley. In that field there sit a few thousand crosses, and, beneath them, the remains of a few thousand American men.

I write “remains” reflexively — evidently, we English speakers have decided to use this euphemism to indicate that time has passed and that it has taken the flesh with it — but in this case it is an especially apposite word, for many of those buried at Madingley were incomplete long before they were interred. Among other things, this is a graveyard for the men who did not come back intact. At the Casablanca Conference of 1943, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt came to an agreement: The Royal Air Force would take care of the nighttime sorties over Germany and beyond; the Americans would fly when it was light. In retrospect, this was a good deal for the Brits. So ugly were the daytime fights that it was not uncommon for deceased rear-gunners to be “hosed” rather than pulled out of their positions when — nay, if — their aircraft returned. In addition to the buried, there are memorials for the 5,125 airmen whose bodies were never found.

[...]

It is easy to forget the dead, and tempting, too, to caricature those whom posterity has lazily deemed “heroes.” But if civilization is indeed a compact between the future and the past, such enticements must always be resisted. When done right, Memorial Day serves as an opportunity to lift the mask and unveil the price tag, thereby acknowledging the unpleasant truth that peace and ordered liberty are not humanity’s natural mode but the legacy of vigilance and heartbreak. At Lexington, at Gettysburg, at Saint-Mihiel, and at Aachen, the men who took up arms and charged forward into the fray issued forth a collective, timeless “no.” Here, they insisted, were the lines that would not be crossed; these were the iniquities that would not be tolerated; theirs were the torches that would not be extinguished without a fight. If we are to avoid a repeat of the mistakes that forced them into their defensive pose, they must never leave our thoughts for too long.

When, on December 7, 1943, the University of Cambridge donated the land at Madingley, its intentions were distressingly prosaic. Casualties sustained during flights from nearby airfields were growing rapidly in number, and the local authorities had no idea what to do with the remains. 73 years later, the terrain has become hallowed. At the far end of the graveyards, there is a small chapel, its door always open. “They knew not the hour, the day, nor the manner of their passing,” an inscription reads, but “when far from home they were called to join that heroic band of airmen who had gone before.” Thank goodness they answered that call. All shame on us should we ever forget it.

My only dissent is with the proposition that these men didn’t know the details of their passing. True, they couldn’t know their fate on any one mission, but they knew far more than most men at war. They were part of a bombing offensive. They knew the target and the time and the route of their flight. They knew when they would encounter flak and fighters. These men surely knew dread. And they went anyway. All the more honor to them.

Sunday, 29 May 2016

After Donald Trump is formally chosen as the Republican presidential nominee, he’ll be able to receive classified U.S. intelligence briefings, which could include some of the same sensitive information that President Obama is given in the Oval Office.

And that prospect has some spies sweating. Trump, who can’t seem to dam his stream of consciousness on Twitter, and who has lately taken to spreading rumors and conspiracy theories on national television, has never been privy to national secrets. Nor has he ever demonstrated that he’s capable of keeping them.

“My concern with Trump will be that he inadvertently leaks, because as he speaks extemporaneously, he’ll pull something out of his hat that he heard in a briefing and say it,” said a former senior U.S. intelligence official who has participated in the process of briefing presidential candidates.

Trump’s biggest advantage is that Hillary! will be either indicted or laughably exonerated for mishandling classified information. One stupid statement could negate that. What if both of them got indicted?

Saturday, 28 May 2016

The Republican Party’s presumptive presidential nominee gave a fiery speech in San Diego and sought to leverage the power of his pulpit to shame one of this city’s federal judges, Gonzalo Curiel, who is hearing a class-action lawsuit against Trump University.

Trump delivered a lengthy monologue about the years-old case involving students who claim they were defrauded by Trump’s real estate “university.” He delved so deeply into details of the case -- at one point, he talked about the origin of the name of the law firm representing him -- that he seemed to lose the attention of his crowd.

Trump leveled a series of blows against Curiel. He called him “a hater of Donald Trump” and “very hostile” person who had “railroaded” him. He then taunted the judge, who has scheduled a trial for late November, after the election.

“I’ll be seeing you in November, either as president ...” Trump said, trailing off. “I think Judge Curiel should be ashamed of himself. I think it’s a disgrace that he’s doing this.” Trump brought up Curiel’s ethnicity: “The judge, who happens to be, we believe, Mexican ... I think the Mexicans are going to end up loving Donald Trump.”

Also, Wikipedia reports Curiel was born in Indiana, not Mexico. But Trump is getting warmer: In February he said the judge was “Spanish.” Perhaps by November Trump will be able to place the judge’s birthplace in the greater Midwest.

Jonah Goldberg argues that a man who lies spontaneously—and I would add from embarrassment over his towering ignorance—is better qualified to be president than a woman who calculates her lies with precision.